Vintage Sheets Octagons Quilt: Piecing

So its time to start sewing this quilt together. If you have missed out on the steps so far look here and here. If you are going to make octagons then follow these steps, if you want to stick to just normal squares then you don't need to do anything before the next stage so take a couple of weeks off. If you are making the octagons then get out all your squares and background triangles that you have already cut and your sewing machine.

Take one square and one triangle. Place the triangle on top of the square right sides together as I have done in this photo above. The triangle needs to overlap the side of the square a little so that when you press it back later the edges will line up neatly with the edges of the square. I did the first one by eye and then pressed it back and it was about right so I carried on doing them by eye. The picture above should give you an idea of the placement for this to try yourself.

Once you have got the placement right, sew a triangle onto one corner of each square. By doing one at a time like this you can save thread and time. We call this method 'chain stitching'. You simply sew one line of stitching on your machine, then without pulling this all the way out of the machine you pass the next thing to stitch into the machine. You end up with a bit of a mess like above but when you have done them all, then simply snip them all apart and stack them in a neat pile.

At this point take 4 squares out of your pile and put aside, these are the corners. Try to remember to take out a mixture of different patches so that you get a variety in your border. (Unless you are not doing yours randomly of course.) Then sew the second corner triangle on to each square. When you have done all these take out enough squares for the edges of your quilt. So my quilt is 9 x 12 and I have already taken the corner squares out, this leaves 2x7 and 2x10 = 34 squares total.

The remaining squares need all four corners sewn with triangles so finish these all off and you should end up with squares that look like this:

When you get to this stages cut all the corners off so that your squares look like this:

I have kept all my little snipped off corners in a bag because I have an idea of what to do with them. Then finally press back your white corners so that you press the seams away from the triangle:

and you should end up with patches that look like this:

Repeat for all your squares and then you are ready for the next step. So come back in two weeks and we can start putting together the quilt top. Zoe xx